The Scottish Catholic Archives hold over 700 individual collections, spanning 800 years of Scottish and European history. From royal archives to sacramental registers; photographs and film; maps and plans, the Scottish Catholic Archive contains about 0.5 km of manuscript sources.

The Scottish Catholic Archives is continually working to improve access to the archive collections through the retro-conversion of our catalogues. Since 2003, over 50,000 catalogue entries have been converted from hand-written format to electronic format. While we work on this retro-conversion, we are additionally making available scanned copies of our handwritten catalogues. They are saved as Adobe pdf files (a free viewer can be downloaded here), and reflect the work of previous archive staff. They have a standard look and feel, with indexes at the start of the document, and further detailed information given on subsequent pages. All archives are described at least to file level, with many to item level.

As retro-conversion continues, the hand written catalogues will be replaced by typed catalogues, and a searchable database should be available online during 2009. We recommend that you browse the catalogues and print those which are helpful to you. Any research request to the Scottish Catholic Archive concerning any of these documents should include the full reference of the item being discussed.